MEMORIES ARE MADE OF THIS
"The great lays you have had, what do you remember about them? I dunno, for me, I'm saying what it is, it's probably not the orga$m. Some broad's forearm on your neck, something her eyes did, there was this sound she made. Or it's me in the … I'm telling you, I'm in bed the next day, she brings me a café au lait, gives me a cigarette."
I need a good excuse for inflicting David Mamet's profanities on Spin readers. And if I have one now, it's that I'm writing this on the 10am from Newcastle to London, the morning after the Test, and, as is so often the way on British railways, I'm reminded of the opening lines of that memorable monologue by Ricky Roma in Mamet's play Glengarry Glen Ross. "All train carriages smell vaguely of $hit. It gets so you don't mind it."
The great spells you have seen live. What do you remember about them? It's probably not the wickets. Or at least, their particulars. Who snicked to slip, who edged into their wicket, or had their stumps scattered across the ground. It's not just that, as Mamet says of great meals, they fade with recollection. It can be hard to take them in at all. Cricket is such a structured game, its progress stately, even sedentary. And then it quickens, unravelling in a giddy rush. The batsmen's disorientation infects the crowd, and so does the surging adrenaline of the bowler. In all the chaos, confusion, and excitement, the details get lost. And afterwards, when it has slowed down again, it is often the unexpected impressions linger. The café au lait and the cigarette.
Looking back on Steve Harmison's seven for 12 at Sabina Park, I can't recall the ball that had Brian Lara caught, or the one which clean bowled Shiv Chanderpaul. But I can still see the field of eight slips and a solitary short leg Michael Vaughan set for the two tail-enders, Adam Sandford and Fidel Edwards. (Would any other recent England captain have had the malicious wit to do that?) And I can still see the despondent local in front of me, who insisted on calling the West Indian captain by his full name of Brian Charles Lara. He had come to the cricket in a three-piece woollen suit, topped with a pork pie hat, and he held his head in his hands while the half-n@ked English fans danced jigs around him.
At New Road the next season, Shoaib Akhtar took six for 16 against Gloucestershire, one of the great forgotten fast spells. He was at the end of an unhappy spell at Worcestershire, in which he had been pilloried by the members, who reckoned he was work-shy. The scorecard says he bowled both the openers, but what stands out now is how he stood at the end of his run, stared down the wicket thinking "I'm ready for my close-up", and flicked his fringe away from his face with his fingers. Ramnaresh Sarwan, the knot of his red bandana sticking out from underneath his helmet, was the only batsman sharp enough to repel him, and the two had their own duel in the midst of a match that went on around them.
The jaffa that Stuart Broad delivered to Michael Clarke on Monday evening will last. But not so well, in my mind, as the loud thump of Brad Haddin's bat as he dropped it, like an axe into a stump, on the yorker Broad sent him as a welcome to the wicket. It was so fast and forceful that the sound echoed around the ground like a gunshot across a moor. Or Broad's anger when he was told by Alastair Cook that the bad light meant he would have to come off. And how he was led, almost by the hand, away to mid-off, like a boxer ordered by the referee to stand in the corner while his opponent took a 10 count.
Everyone who was there will have their own memories. Even, and especially, the Australian players. Good judges have suggested that this was Australia's Adelaide, a reversal so abrupt and unlikely that it will leave wounds which won't easily heal. Better to remember exactly how awful it was, and set it as a low water mark to which they are determined they will never return, as England did when they were dismissed for 51 at Sabina Park.
Michael Clarke didn't have much to say when he was asked what was happening in the dressing room during the collapse – "some guys are taking their pads off, some guys are putting their pads on, pretty much" – but his reply betrayed his weariness, and his numbness. To his credit, Clarke he didn't offer any excuses. The trouble was he didn't have any explanations either.
Clarke said he couldn't fault the team's preparation or training, which had been "outstanding", their "belief, their will to win", or the bowlers, who were doing "a fantastic job". The fault, he said, was in the batting. And he doesn't know how to fix it. "All I can ask from the players is that they continue to try to get better every day." The collapses, Clarke admitted, had been going on for "a few years", and now Australia had "a couple of months" to fix it. The wry smile on his face said as much as his mouth did about the likelihood of that.
In the short term Australia, as they showed at Old Trafford, are only ever one big innings away from a win. But over a series they are still two batsmen short of a team. They have to decide whether the men they have in this squad have the character to learn from this defeat, rather than be bowed down by it. Clarke isn't sure they even have that option. "Everyone says 'rebuild, rebuild, rebuild,'" he said. "But at the end of the day you need guys making runs in first class cricket to take somebody's spot." Only four batsmen scored more than 500 runs at an average of over 40 in the Sheffield Shield last season. A decade ago, 13 players managed to do that in a Shield season. Five years ago, 15 did.
Darren Lehmann might disagree with his captain. This winter he has the chance to shape the squad according to his own ideas rather than Mickey Arthur's. The Shield statistics may be damning, the system might be flawed, but if you look with the right kind of eyes there will still be men with in who can succeed in Test cricket. Duncan Fletcher did exactly that when England were in a similar situation, calling up Vaughan and Marcus Trescothick, men with underwhelming county records but who, he reckoned, had the right stuff. Fletcher judged players on strength of character, not skill, or first class statistics. They are not so rare as you might think. There are a couple knocking around English cricket right now, in Adam Voges and Darren Hussey.
"What is it we're afraid of?" Roma asks in the middle of that speech. "Loss?" Absolutely. Clarke's captaincy, as Ian Chappell has pointed out, is marked by the fact that he's not scared of defeat. That was the approach he grew up with, but it's not much cop when you're in a team that has lost seven of their last eight Tests. When the fog clears, what he should take from Broad's spell is that right now he needs a few players who are scared of defeat, ones who loathe it so much that they're not even prepared to countenance it.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
"I didn't swear at the kids. All I did was tell them to get off the pitch."
Margaret Burn, 81, defends herself against accusations that she launched a foul-mouthed tirade against a group of children who ran on to the pitch during a match at Marsden Cricket Club. Mrs Burn, who seems a lively sort, has been supporting Marsden CC for 60 years. But the club have banned her from visiting the ground while they investigate the incident.
"I didn't swear at anyone, I've never sworn in my life," said Mrs Burn, who is a great grandmother. "Whenever there is a match playing, I have always chased the kids off the cricket pitch. But this time I told them, they were just goading me and ignoring what I was saying. I kept telling them they shouldn't be playing on the pitch when there was a game on, but they just shouted back they weren't doing any harm. But what if the ball hit them? Then they would have known about it."
One guesses that, after their encounter with Mrs Burn, the kids would have "known about" it even if the ball didn't come anywhere near them. Marsden, whose club president is David Miliband, were forced to call the police to have her removed from the ground after she refused to pay her suspension any attention. "We have received complaints regarding her conduct towards young people and, as a club, we have a duty of care to both our members and to Margaret to investigate those complaints," said a Marsden spokesman fluent in corporate mumbo-jumbo. "The decision to suspend Margaret pending the outcome of the investigation has been a difficult one, and one the committee has not taken lightly, but we have to follow protocol."
Mrs Burn was unimpressed with all that. She visits the ground once a week with her husband John, who suffers from Alzheimer's disease. "It's the only enjoyment he gets once a week and that's been taken away from him because he can't go there without me, I need to be there to look after him." She insists she won't back down until she is allowed back, but recently refused to attend a meeting to discuss the incident because she wanted to "collect more evidence" in her defence first.
"Police were called at 3.50pm on 27 July to Marsden Cricket Club following report of complaint," said a spokeswoman for Northumbria police. "This," she added, "is a civil dispute." It doesn't sound much like one.
STILL WANT MORE?
English fans will want to savour every bit of our Ashes coverage, which includes, among all the other bits and bobs, Mike Selvey's thoughts on what's up with Jimmy Anderson, Tom Jenkins's photo gallery of the Test, and the latest podcast. Australian readers, meanwhile, can join Aaron Timms in asking "at what precise moment did Australia eff itself up?"
Elsewhere Gary Naylor has wrapped up the week in county cricket, and all of Richard Rae's superb coverage of the women's Ashes Test can be found here.
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